Cohen’s ‘Borat’

What was wrong with 'Bora'????

Not that ???Borat??? was completely without merit or that everyone who got zapped in it was blameless, but the film took a couple of fairly innocent American characteristics, uncomfortableness in social situations and hospitality to foreigners, and used them to entrap and humiliate its victims. Scenario: You find yourself in some unusual social situation and you are suddenly confronted with a passing foreigner with a bizarre accent spouting all sorts of strange and outrageous things, all delivered in a spirit of great bonhomie. A bit stunned, disoriented and not thinking too quickly, since you have never encountered such a creature, you smile back, nod and just sort of go with the flow, while in the back of your mind you ask, "What IS this? Are these just innocent malapropisms? Does he have any idea what he???s saying? Does he think this is the way WE talk? Is he ineptly trying to be funny? Or ??? what?" In any case, you assume that soon you will mercifully pass out of his orbit and you can resume your comparatively more sane life. But--SPRING! CLAMP!--you have stepped into a big jagged leg-hold trap and you forever will be revealed to millions of future filmgoers as the scum of the earth, as a leering drooling closet racist anti-Semite KKK nightrider. Of course the reason this movie appealed to so many in the liberal establishment, particularly in the media, is that it confirms their vainest fantasies about themselves, contrasting their enlightened selves to the nonentities who sadly dwell out in America???s hinterlands, the area of the country filled with lesser-evolved types who are brimming with barely disguised hate, fear and racism, people who do embarrassing things like wave flags from pickups. Keep in mind that many of these, um, left-of-center cultural arbiters are the very same ones who piously preach "tolerance" and "multiculturalism," and yet roll their eyes and snicker at a large segment of people in their own culture. Comically, many are also the same people who imagine themselves to be champions of the working class. Go figure. 'Borat' was just the right thing to stroke their self-important pseudo-sophistication. In sum, yes, 'Borat' was a very revealing film--but in quite the opposite way that many reviewers comfortingly reassured themselves and their like-minded friends.
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Border Enforcement + Immigration Moratorium + Job & Eco Sanity

Great article, and I agree. It definitely struck a nerve!

Borat? Stupidest of stupid so-called movies, already dead and gone? Mr. Ansen, write about movies, please. Don't waste our time.